Mondrian's Garden

Mondrian’s Garden reflects on the medium of painting itself – its intrinsic limits and the dual possibility it offers to both represent the world we evolve in as realistic and as an abstraction. As others have done before him, Mike Patten uses the tools of painting to discuss painting. He plays with the thin line that separates abstraction from realism.

Mondrian’s Garden might first give the impression of an abstract work, due to its minimalist aspect and the obvious references to modernist art and to Barnett Newman in particular, but it embodies the very concrete desire many artists share to reproduce reality, to produce reality. In his installation, Patten uses green masking tape to mimic paint. The choice of colour he makes is especially meaningful when an analogy with Piet Mondrian’s production has been made, as the latter completely avoided the use of green, which he considered to be evocative of nature and landscapes. In the accompanying works from the Ladder series, Patten further questions the notion of reality, as black masking tape is used to render ladder silhouettes onto framed glass, and the shadows thus cast onto the wall.